Heat removal is a prominent factor in a computer system and data center design. The number of high performance electronics components such as high performance processors packaged inside servers has steadily increased, thereby increasing the amount of heat generated and dissipated during the ordinary operations of the servers. The reliability of servers used within a data center decreases if the environment in which they operate is permitted to increase in temperature over time. Maintaining a proper thermal environment is critical for normal operations of these servers in data centers, as well as the server performance and lifetime. It requires more effective and efficient heat removal solutions especially in the cases of cooling these high performance servers.
Power intensive processors enable the solution of intensive computing such as deep learning. Electrical servers having those processors, i.e., high-power central processing units (CPUs) and/or general-purpose or graphical processing units (GPUs), have a very high power density per volumetric space, and hence, traditional simple air cooling is very challenging. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling provides a better cooling performance for those power-intensive processors, and saves energy consumption compared to an air-cooling only approach.
Typically, liquid cooling is provided to a processor using a cold plate attached onto an external surface of the processor. Cooling liquid is distributed through the cold plate to exchange heat generated from the processor. Similar to a heat sink, thermal interface material may be used to fill the gaps in the surfaces of the device and the cold plate. The cold plate should be fully in contact with the processor to enable the cold plate to function properly. Without proper contact, the cold plate may not be able to as it is designed or it may fail. This requires a proper mounting pressure. However, if the cold plate mounting pressure is too much, it may cause potential damage to the processor. There has been a lack of efficient ways to mount a cold plate onto a processor with proper pressure without causing damage to the processor.